In national and international discourses, Italians are often represented as a greying population failing to reproduce itself. Italian women are targeted for their very low birth rates, while migrant women are scrutinized for their 'excessive' fertility and abortion rates. These demographic concerns over differential reproduction reflect 'replacement anxiety' about the below-replacement rates of Italians and the replacement of Italians by immigrants. Demographic anxieties coalesce with the intensifying of Catholic 'vitapolitics' manifesting in the paradox of pro-natalist interventions coexisting with the curtailment of fertility-enhancing reproductive technologies. The children of migrants emerge in some population discourses as a threat rather than a contribution to the reproduction of the nation. Drawing on multi-sited ethnographic research in Milan, this paper examines how reproduction in contemporary Italy has emerged as a contested social, political, and moral issue that invests Italian and migrant women in different ways, engendering different forms and terms of resistance and contestation. On what terms are subjects governed and called upon to govern themselves to be more 'rational' and 'responsible' reproducers of the nation? What subjectivities and local responses are engendered by the politics of reproduction in Italy? As different rationalities and notions of responsible reproduction circulate, ethnographic research sheds light on how anxieties over low birth rates are reappropriated and redeployed against the state, suggesting that subjects are not so easily governable by population and reproductive discourses. This research contributes to the literature on critical demography and the politics of reproduction and migration in the new Europe.
In this article, we investigate the delicacy of adopting pronatalism as a public position in Italy. Mounting scientific and political knowledge about the demographic "problem" exposes a new hegemonic formation that low fertility is dangerous. Drawing on ethnographic contexts, political debates, media publications, and policy documents, we trace the "demographic emergency" and compare two policies: a monetary baby bonus and a law restricting assisted reproduction. The coexistence of incentives to counter superlow fertility with prohibitions on high-tech baby making reflect the contested governance of "social cohesion." We conclude that scholarly and popular discourses serve as a sort of "social Viagra." Ultimately, both policies sought to rejuvenate family norms. Both aimed to fortify the political terrain of a nation-state struggling to achieve and maintain modernity against a backdrop of immigration and aging. Modernity became a weapon of the state to exert control over Italian fertility practices and of its critics to deploy orientalizing representations of backwardness. [
This paper examines the enactment of relational welfare in Milan through a focus on how new welfare professionals operating in deprived neighborhoods in Milan work to stimulate participation and relational energies among migrant and low-income parents. The paper introduces the notion of the “intimate public,” a spatial and relational milieu for activating an increasingly diverse public in the absence of traditional welfare resources. Through the lens of the intimate public, a number of effects come into view: First, the incitement to participate recasts the private as simultaneously a source of new forms of solidarity and a potential obstacle to social cohesion and integration. Second, assumptions about the organic and sustainable nature of citizen-based solidarity effectively erase the affective labor required to produce and sustain it, especially in marginalized neighborhoods. Finally, the intense relationality that characterizes the intimate public produces uncertainty and entanglements that bind professionals and participants in compelling ways.
This article argues for gendering affective citizenship and humanitarianism. Both of these ‘regimes of care’ are understood to work through benevolent affect, to mobilize citizens in the wake of the retrenchment of the welfare state. Ethnography with Italian-origin women volunteers at a Milanese association shows that the affect and motivations of affective citizens can starkly deviate from benevolence and ‘do-gooderism’. Analyses of post-Fordist affective citizenship focus on the shift from waged labour and state-mediated forms of social security to precarious labour and privatized responsibilities for welfare, implicitly centring the (male) breadwinner as the subject of these transformations. By contrast, this article seeks to call attention to the continuities in unwaged care. In so doing, it shows how the Fordist legacy of gendered citizenship ‘haunts’ its post-Fordist affective and humanitarian reconfigurations and highlights the contradictions and contestations that mark ongoing transformations of social citizenship in Europe.
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